Bullet Soul, An Original Shooter From 5pb

While 5pb’s main business is making visual novels, the publisher dabbled in the shooter genre with an Xbox 360 version of DoDonPachi Daioujou. Their port was buggy and it borrowed code from Arkia’s PlayStation 2 version.

Perhaps, 5pb will have better luck with their own shooter. Famitsu lifted the curtain on Bullet Soul, a vertical shooter with characters designed by Bakemonogatari character designer Akio Watanabe. Bullet Soul is scheduled to come out in Japan this winter.

Bakemonogatari character designer? Nice. Though the screenshots don’t make it look like it will be actual planes doing the fighting, not flying girls.

neo_firenze

To be fair, you should probably mention that 5pb’s second Cave shooter release (Ketsui) was an absolutely fantastic port that silenced the critics who were all over them about DDP:DOJ. Of course, Cave watched development closely and supported 5pb, but Ketsui turned out amazing in any case.As for the “buggy” DOJ port, most of the obvious issues were goofy menu navigation and long initial load times. While irritating, these things didn’t get in the way of the playability of the game in the least. The actual gameplay bugs were such that the vast majority of players who aren’t competing for top scores would probably never notice. And to their credit, 5pb is taking responsibility and releasing a patch for these issues (current word is the patch will be live in the next month). The stealing code from Arika’s PS2 DOJ port though, that’s inexcusable. But it really does look like 5pb might have learned from their issues. Ketsui sure was a huge step in the right direction.

Aoshi00

Yea, DDP DOJ really plays fine other than the screwy menu and initial load times, so I hope they would finally come up w/ a patch like you said, saying sry doesn’t fix anything for those who’ve bought the game. Ketsui port is great too w/ virtually no loading. I never really blamed 5pb, unlike NMH Paradise, the frequent in-game loading and freezing royally got in the way of the gameplay. I just wanted to them to patch DOJ and make it the way it was meant to be since it was such a good game. W/ Dai-Fukkatsu, Muchi Pork/Pink Sweets, Gunwage, and this, it’s going to set me back some major moola lol..

masuto

Wow, so many shooters are out these days.

http://waxingerratic.tumblr.com/ ECM

“Borrowed”?? C’mon guys, do we really have to sink to euphemisms? They *stole* the code, they did not *borrow* it.

http://blog.botec.vg/ edgeCrusher

Do we know if 5bp in fact knowingly stole the code, or where they simply misinformed about the legalities of where the code originated from by a third party? I was under the impression that it was the latter. And while largely blameless, 5bp assumed responsibility, and asked Cave’s and Arika’s forgiveness, which is why this whole thing never ended up in court.

superdry

The story goes that Aqua Systems who developed the 360 did take the code without permission from a 3rd party that is some source code archiving company. 5pb is responsible since they didn’t do enough QA testing during the production of the game. I don’t know anyone knows if they really knew that the source code was stolen.

Since 5pb did a great job on Ketsui, I have faith in this shooter to be somewhat decent.

neo_firenze

Also, apparently the people responsible for the Arika code theft fiasco were the “B team” who were working on the normal “white label” DOJ. And apparently they are all gone from 5pb now. The team that remains is the people who worked on Ketsui (again, fantastic release), and on the DOJ Black Label port.

And for those of you who are now confused, the 360 version contained 3 modes – a 360 exclusive arrange mode, the never before ported “Black Label” arcade variant of DOJ, and the original “white label” DOJ that was previously ported to PS2 by Arika (said PS2 version is what the 5pb devs swiped code from while working on the 360 port).

http://twitter.com/ViciousReiven Dusti Dever

Finally a Vert-shooter I can be interested in.

neo_firenze

One more detail missing that I’d expect a lot of Siliconera readers would care about… Kenji Ito is doing the soundtrack for Bullet Soul. Yes, the same Kenji Ito of SaGa and Mana series fame.

Code

rar, just one more for the list >w<~!

http://photovoltaik.bandcamp.com/ Ujn Hunter

Please be region free! Please be region free! Or better yet… please release in North America!

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